I just found this free program to download called VarieDrop. It was recommended on PCWorld.com. (I love that site.)

Here's a copy of the article about using this. I am trying it now, setting one for the signature limits and two for the max. photo upload limits. So far it's too easy! Try it and let me know if you like it, too. Here's the article:

How to Resize Photos Easily

And there is. Recently, a friend turned me on to VarieDrop, a clever little program that can resize photos to any number of different dimensions by simply dragging and dropping images. I suspect the program has been around for a while, but it's new to me.

Start by installing it from the Vieas Website. The program is free, though when it comes to support, you get what you pay for: The help is in Japanese, and not at all helpful, even after running the text through Bing Translate.

Nonetheless, you probably won't ever need the help. The program is very simple to use. It looks like this:

Drop your photo onto any one of the five areas shown in the screen shot, and VarieDrop will immediately resize your photo according to the preference of that individual area.

Here's an example: Suppose you want to use the same photo in two locations on your site. In the first slot, the photo cannot exceed 450 pixels wide. In the second, it must be 300 pixels wide. And let's say you also want to send the photo to your parents, so you'd like to make sure that neither dimension exceeds 800 pixels for email.

All that is easy to do with VarieDrop. Click the Set button for the first area and check the Resize box. Set the width to 450 and leave the height blank, or set it to 0 (which means that you don't care what the height turns out to be). Make sure that the Output Format is JPEG and the Quality is high (I'd set it to 100). Clear the Max File Size, since in this case we don't care how large the file is. Click OK.

For the second area, repeat all the same steps, but set the width to 300. And for the third area, set both width and height to 800 to make sure that neither the height nor the width exceeds 800 pixels.

VarieArea has a few other tricks. You might have noticed that you can choose Max or Fixed. If you choose Fixed, the program will crop the photo to your specified size, which isn't a setting I would recommend. And you can set the output file type, such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF. If you frequently need to convert photos to a specific format, you can reserve an area in VarieDrop for the desired format and turn off resizing, so the program becomes a one-step file format converter.

Finally, note that that area 5, at the bottom of the window, batch processes the dropped photo with all the settings from any of the other areas.

If you frequently need to resize or convert files among file formats, I suspect that VarieDrop will find a favored spot on your Start menu.

Have your people call my people. We'll do carrots.

RabbitPamSouth Florida

Forum Leader

10636 posts

8/07/2012 9:44 AM

OK, this program is cool. I just used it to insert the pix above, having selected 600x600 max for BB photos. Just left the requirements in Box 2 and dragged the jpgs into it, and they poppped back resized onto my desktop.

Here are 2 more samples. I made box 1 the size for signatures, 100x500. Here's the result: